The Cypres2 has the best record in terms of safety and reliability. It's also the most expensive, has a limited life span, and requires two maintenance checks during that life.

It's hard to make the ecominic argument when your life is on the line. Over the course of the 12 year life, the total cost of ownership is about $150/year, so we're not talking about a fortune. In 2012, it's roughly the cost of one days jumping per year to keep a Cypres2 in your rig.

Split the difference, and sleep in on two jump days per year, and your Cypres2 is paid for.

bumping up an old thread. I was searching for all that cypress vs vigil threads and I just want to voice my personal opinion on why I choose Cypress 2 over Vigil 2.

I've been building, fixing, upgrading PC's since mid 90 as my hobby and I do similar stuff for a living now. I do not have an experience with skydiving equipment, but I do have a lot with computers.

I've seen a lot of machines from well known or not so known manufacturers that go past P.O.S.T. without any issues, but fail to boot, freeze, randomly restarted or just not working properly. 4 and 8 years check gives me a lot of confidence that something that was overlooked by QC guys is going to be noticed/fixed. Or if I wansn't taking care of my rig properly and unit/cutter got damaged or rusted ect.

Difference in annual cost to own is only $65 a year. I agree that vigil is the great unit, but I made my choice.

I have a great deal of experience with what you are saying, but I've also seen PC's that worked fine 95% of the time and then croak. Never to fail any diagnostics test and not failing reliably enough to diagnose. You take your best guess and wait 3 weeks to see if it craps out again...

As such I'm not so optimistic about the 4 year service interval. With the Vigil you can get readouts of the sensor values. The complexity is several orders of magnitude lower than a PC so a power on test can be a lot more thorough.

Can someone with detailed knowledge indicate what Airtec actually tests on the checkup? Or would that be a trade secret?

I have a great deal of experience with what you are saying, but I've also seen PC's that worked fine 95% of the time and then croak. Never to fail any diagnostics test and not failing reliably enough to diagnose. You take your best guess and wait 3 weeks to see if it craps out again...

As such I'm not so optimistic about the 4 year service interval. With the Vigil you can get readouts of the sensor values. The complexity is several orders of magnitude lower than a PC so a power on test can be a lot more thorough.

Can someone with detailed knowledge indicate what Airtec actually tests on the checkup? Or would that be a trade secret?

My memory is that the Airtek, or SSK website has details of what happens during the check. It includes checking the activation near the limits of the firing parameters, and subjecting the unit to vibration and temperature conditions that might go a long way toward resolving the sort of "no fault found" that you speak of when trying to diagnose a personal computer's intermittent fault.

A self test is very limited in relation to this, and a single crude test done in an altitude chamber (like what an FXC pin puller requires) is trivial in comparison.

It should be remembered that some units that fail the series of tests done during a 4 year check were doing just fine during every self test, meaning that the units had flaws that a self test cannot find. The possibility of such flaws being present is not unique to a particular brand.